“Don’t talk to strangers” – that sentence is probably taught all over the world by parents to their children. Ironically on Twitter and other similar social media platforms, we do exactly the opposite. Personally, I know less than 1% of the people I follow and people who follow me on Twitter – they are all strangers, yet I trust them, and they trust me!
How can they trust me? Before I get to that, let’s talk about Personal Branding and the role of trust. When I first set out to start my blog, my sole purpose was to establish a level of trust. I wasn’t trying to buy someone’s attention, nor beg for it, not bug for it – I was simply trying to earn it! I wanted to reflect my passion about people and my love of marketing – to me they go hand in hand!
Everyone knows that trust is earned and it takes time to build a certain level of trust. Here’s what I learned about trust through my short blogging experience:
Give, and then some
In each and every post, I try to share with my reader thoughts, cases, research about marketing and all its magic be it from my experience or from my readings. Social Media haters accuse me of wasting my time and energy on simply giving people such valuable information for free. So I ask them, how else can I expect readers to trust me – so I send out an infomercial about my marketing consultancy business and expect people to come running through the door? Are people that dumb? Am I the only marketing consultant out there?
Not only do you have to give, but you have to be generous in your giving. Seth Godin laid it out beautifully when he said “The new economy often involves trading in things that don’t cost money. There’s no incremental cost in writing an essay, composing a song or making an introduction. Since it doesn’t cost money to play, we have the ability to give before we get.”
Recently, I was asked by one of those “strangers” if I wanted to write as a guest on her post. Think about that for a second, Karima was asking me to use my time to write a post on her blog – why on earth would I do that, right? Wrong! Had she not “trusted” me, would she have risked damaging the reputation of her blog with one of my posts? Let’s look at it from a different angle and ask who was the one giving in this scenario, me? Yes, but how about Karima. She gave me the opportunity, the space, the trust – she even gave me access as an editor on her blog to upload my post! The planned irony is that I wrote a post about “The Art of Giving“.
Create Art
One of the great things I learned from working for SUBWAY is they called the people behind the counter preparing your $5 Foot long, Sandwich Artists. Why are they called artists? Because they don’t just prepare your sandwich, they “create” an overall experience that encompasses all your 5 senses. You are a sandwich artist as well; ok maybe not a sandwich artist, but certainly an artist. Each one of us is an artist. It’s up to you, if you want to unleash the artist within.
I’m not asking you to pick a brush and start painting, but I am asking you to seek out your Mona Lisa, your 5th Symphony, your Romeo & Juliet … you have to be an artist that goes after his passion. Learn to trust yourself; it’s the first step in gaining the trust of others. In one of his podcasts, Godin defined art as the act of bringing humanity and connection to change someone else. Let your work speak of you; let it reflect you, the artist! When Da Vinci was painting Mona Lisa, was he trying to impress someone? Was he seeking some kind of recognition? He was just capture his passion in a painting, like I do in every post I write – this genuineness cannot be replicated or imitated, it can only be felt and that in turn leads to trust.
The challenge, however, is not in the unleashing of the artist per say, it’s more in handling the critics of your art, which leads me to the next element of trust – Agree to Disagree.
Agree to disagree
You probably heard the phrase a million times! Dare to be yourself, don’t plagiarize your identity to please others. People may disagree with you, and that’s ok – how can you stand out if you simply protect yourself by blending in. Question the norm, revolt against yourself and the taboos that society has cursed you with. Who’s to say that marketing only has 4Ps, I can name at least 20Ps for you without having to think! Who’s to say that Descartes was absolutely right about his infamous quote “I think therefore I am” – I think that is only half of the picture! Why are you afraid of people disagreeing with you? If you agree with everything that is said, what does that make you – a hypocrite, which is the opposite of a trustworthy person!
When people come to me for advice, I am blunt about it. I don’t patronize them by telling them what they want to hear. It might make them feel better if I did, but will I have helped them? I don’t think so! I dare you to say the truth, unpolished, untarnished, just the raw truth. People may disagree with you, sometimes even hate you, but they will certainly trust your and respect you!
So back to the initial question of how do all these people trust me? Well trust is not only transitive, it’s viral. It spreads very far. If A trusts B, and B trusts C, then A trusts C by transitivity (this where you can tell I used to be a math student). So try to replicate that model in a space like Twitter – you won’t only cover the whole alphabet, you will cover them in every language, in every font, and in every size … having said that, I’d like to share with you a list of people who taught me about the value and reach of trust. They appreciated my art and made it viral, and for that I am forever indebted to them.
George MacDonald said “To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved”. Think About It!
In my experience, trust comes with time. The time and effort has to be placed in relationships online and offline to build trust. Wrote about that a little hear http://bit.ly/aqytio and the important thing like you stated above is the give and take where both parties are participating.
Good stuff.
I have no surprised that you once received accusation of you being stupid to give your advice or expertise for free. Most of people are still living in the past and have no idea of the evolution of free information. Honestly, they can still find those information somewhere else if it’s not from you. What you do in your blog, giving free marketing insights and advice, is what I called fishing. You firstly attract people to go to your blog and twitter and make them reading what you write and what you tweet as a habit. Yes, you are giving free advice, valuable ones to how your expertise and gain their trust. So whatever they want to ask, they go to you instead of somewhere else. What’s better way to attract customers than this? Those who think you are stupid and wasting your time…forget about them, period
As someone who witness your growth in the SM world, I have no doubt you have already built up your reputation here. Being a chinese, I know how difficult is it to build trust and how important it is. You might say with all the technology and communication channel, it’s easier to get in touch with people. However, on the other hand, it’s also more difficult to build real trust among people, since less and less personal interactions involved in our communication and also we are in touch with too many people everyday. We are even more conservative on trusting people. So congrats on working towards your success John, but i believe, it’s still a long way to go
I just can’t imagine you telling people of what they want to hear, but your own opinion 🙂 I’m glad there are still honest people out there, it makes me feel that i’m not the only weird one…however, from my experience, there is a balance between agreeing and agreeing to disagree.
With today social media tools (Twitter, Blog, Youtube, etc.) , trust became easy to earn.
The old wise saying, “to give is better than to receive” is so true. The act of giving is often associated with our recognition of our own blessings that we have received from our Maker. Those who don’t have enough, often won’t be able to share, be it material wealth or the wealth of wisdom. And I’m talking about the perception about our own “wealth”. For some people who are financial rich, they may never feel they have enough, thus they never “give”.
As for “Trust”, online communications had perhaps created a virtual world where we feel “protected” as long as the exchange is about information, ideas and opinions. The level of trust accorded to each other is based on the observations gathered from online communications comprising emails, posts, blogs, comments. These virtual “meetings” of minds conjure snapshots of the character and integrity of our online “friends”. Social media has opened up a whole new universe for “meeting” people whom we may never cross paths in the real world.
Trust is based on instinct as much as common sense, online or otherwise.
Michael, I loved how you highlighted the “perception of wealth” – as you said, we all have something to offer, but our mis-perception of our own “wealth” is what holds us back. I’m not sure about being protected online, if you think about it, online you expose yourself to an even bigger pool of possible “haters”, but I do understand your point about the lack of human contact, which might play a role in inflecting a more serious injury.
Thanks for your great insight Michael
John,
Love the thoughts here. Thanks for leading me here. There isn’t much I would add to what you have said on this topic, but it does make me think of the whole idea of great marketers being storytellers. People who tell stories are givers and artists (and if they aren’t we are predisposed to think they are). Great marketers have that ability to present a product or service as a story, not simply a commodity. Giving and artistry in themselves tend to generate trust, and social media allows us as marketers to build new channels of trust that we were not able to utilize before.
Great post. Really hits home for me. I could go on about this all day!
Thanks again,
Eric (aka EF_Forbes)
(I work for Forbes.com on Audience Development & Social Media. Opinion@Large is my personal blog)
You just gave me an idea of a new post – Storytelling in Social Media. I agree with you 100%, the best marketeers are the best storytellers, because they live it, breathe it, love it! You reminded me how I used to love following my dad around during his early days in sales; I loved how he sold a story not a product – I still believe this incredible man can sell sand to the Bedouins and convince them that they need it! He was so passionate about his job, that he made you love everything about it, and the product just happened to be part of the whole package. So the purchase of the product becomes marginal to the story itself. To me that is the essence of marketing as you so clearly stated in your reply.
I will definitely be visiting opinionatlarge.com – thanks for the referral.
absolutely. and just to prove the point, your little story about following your dad around was a type of marketing in itself, for your personal brand, at least in my opinion. also, convincing someone they need something is great, but convincing someone they want something is even better. when we need something we pay for its functionality. when we want something we pay for its story.
reading these string of comments is a story in itself. man, the metaphor just keeps proving itself.
John – Great post.
To those outside of the social media world looking in, this building of trust through the exchange of 140 character nibbles of information (and links to longer blog pots, videos, podcasts and photos etc.) must seem strange. But for many of us inside the bubble, these tools that allow us to share both information and slices of who we are, can be very powerful – both personally and professionally.
Seeing a crumb trail of information from someone, over time, actually fills in a more robust view of a person (or a business) than one gets from an exchange of business cards and a five minute chat an a networking event. Also – with social media tools – you can go check a person out in other online sites – to see if the digital footprint is consistent, or equally interesting/useful or even sketchy.
In the old style marketing, you would rarely send your readers over to a competitor’s site – but here – that is often the case – guest posts; retweeting (on Twitter that’s – passing along someone else’s message – blog post link etc. ); reaching out to help someone looking for info you have – and sharing it will anyone who looks – not JUST your clients, these things are the norm. And all of it lays the foundation for trust.
Of course we still have to do the proposals and do the work well, but social media can open doors that we might never have even had the opportunity to even knock on before. It is still a buyer beware Caveat Emptor world out there, but the buyer can do a lot more tire kicking, learning about the reputation of the person or company (while learning info themselves), than they ever could before.
John,
Great article. Your writing reaches far beyond marketing, social media and Twitter. Your writing reaches into the core of human lifes.
The issue of trust is sensitive because,we each define our extent of trust in the other person. Twitter is a good example, though, on how you can get to trust people based on their intellect, ideas, perceived values. but let’s not forget that behind each keyboard, lies a human being, capable of the good and the bad. so, your idealism is what makes you who you are.
Thank you again for sharing your thoughts,
KC
“Learn to trust yourself.” That’s the gem I’m going to spread today. Thanks!